[Illustration: PULPIT IN THE CHURCH OF GROPPOLI NEAR PISTOJA. A.D. 1194. _See page 249._] His school at Pisa inaugurated a revival which was to change art for all the world. Yet it was only a step and not a sudden leap. He was no ancestorless genius springing from darkness and chaos, but a link in the chain of art from which in him a new strand departed, leading towards Donatello and Ghiberti. He took the forms of his sect, but improved and freed them; he held to the traditional symbolism of his guild, but classicized and enriched it. His greatest advance was in the modelling of the human figure, and here his classic models helped him. One suspects that he depended much on those models, for where he had no antique to copy from, he degenerated into the mediævalism of his fraternity. The mixture of the two styles is very apparent in the different panels of his pulpit, some of which look as if they had come from Antonine's column, while others are heavier and less graceful by far than Guido da Como's simple natural figures. The fact was, that in his time the whole guild was developing under the freer conditions of art, and Niccolò was one of its leading masters, and endowed with especial talent. With him the Romanesque period closes, and the Italian Gothic begins. Led by him the Comacines in Tuscany left the rude, distorted images and meaningless monsters behind, and marched on towards the perfection of sculpture of the human form as shown by Donatello and Michael Angelo. [Illustration: PULPIT IN SIENA CATHEDRAL. BY NICCOLÒ PISANO. A.D. 1266. _See page 250._] Among the Comacines in Lombardy the same change was in progress. Jacopo Porrata, working at nearly the same time, carved the life-like prophets and bas-relief on the façade of the cathedral of Cremona, which bears the legend, "Magister Jacobus Porrata de Cumis fecit hanc rotam MCCLXXIIII." Antonio de Frix of Como, working in concert with Meo di Checco, carved the beautiful roof of the Duomo at Ferrara, while other Masters were sculpturing sacred stories on pulpits and doorways, vestibules and decorations in many a church which their forerunners had built. With the development of the Gothic, the guild again changed the style of their ornamentation. The pointed gable over the circular arch was one of the first signs of this change. You see it in Siena, Orvieto, Florence, and the fourteenth-century porches in Lombardy. The gable gave an opening for statuary, floriated crockets, and ornate pinnacles; the pointed arch opened a way to beautiful tracery; the upward shaft and pilaster afforded space for the ornate tabernacle or saint-filled niche; for the sculptor-architect never let an inch go plain which could be effectively sculptured.